Update table instantly or “Bulk” Update in database later? And is it advisable?

I have a question regarding a semi-constant update in a database. In short it is regarding a checkout function on a web page, which each time the checkout function is evoked it do five steps.

I want to try to optimize this function and have my eye on a step where I update a table each time the checkout is performed. I take the information retrieved from the shopping cart and then update the table in question.

I do have some indexes on the table, the gain from those are greater than leaving them so this is a cost I’m willing to take.

Now, my question is. Could it in some way regard开发者_JS百科ing to performance be better to not update the table instantly but collect every checkout items and save them in some way (maybe in a file) and then at a specific time (or several times) at day take this file and then update the table with the new information.

Then I started thinking about if there was a possibility to use some sort of Bulk Update to take a file, hashmap, array (or?) and then update it.

And I’m using IBM DB2 version 9.7

Mestika

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You will lose the ability to do transactions, or to recover from failure after a step midway, so I would avoid using this approach. You could try using prepared statements, or batch updates offered by JDBC 2.0 where multiple statements are submitted to the DB as a single unit.